Academy of Sciences vet Freeland Dunker

WHAT I DO: Freeland Dunker, California Academy of Sciences Veterinarian

Updated 4:46 pm, Monday, February 11, 2013

Dr. Freeland Dunker has also been a vet at the S.F. Zoo, where a giraffe once gave him a black eye.

Dr. Freeland Dunker has also been a vet at the S.F. Zoo, where a giraffe once gave him a black eye.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Academy of Sciences vet Freeland Dunker

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When a shoe falls into an open-top tank and an alligator swallows it, veterinarian Freeland Dunker finds a way to retrieve it. When tropical fish called prochilodus are introduced to an exhibit tank, he isolates the predatory redtail catfish in a holding tank, lets the newcomers adjust and slowly reintroduces the predators.

Dunker spent 20 years at the San Francisco Zoo, and in 2008 moved to the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences when the facility was rebuilt and its animal collection expanded.

Dunker, 58, grew up in Burbank and studied natural resources management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and veterinary science at UC Davis. He lives in Pacifica with his wife, Jackie, a veterinary technician, and their sons, Nick and Thomas, 19 and 15. They have two cats, a dog, an African spurred tortoise and a pet tarantula.

I sometimes ask people, "What do you think I do here at the aquarium?" and a lot of people say, "Well, you treat sick animals." But that's only a minimal part of it.

With the aquarium's animal health staff, I oversee the health of the entire collection: the fish, the birds, the herps (reptiles and amphibians); their acquisition and the quarantine process that prevents diseases from entering the resident population; the nutritional aspect of what they eat. I give risk assessments to animal husbandry staff when they want to change how the animals are exhibited.

Our goal is an annual exam of every animal in the collection.

Before working at the zoo and aquarium, I spent 10 years in private practice, both large animal (cattle, horses) and small animal (dogs, cats) practice. When I went into zoo practice, the animals I felt most comfortable with were the hoof stock - elephants, giraffes, zebras - because that was my background. I knew how to predict their behaviors. They're still my favorites.

I was kicked in the face by a giraffe once. I had a big black eye, but I didn't break any bones. Another time a giraffe fell asleep and rolled over on top of me. I just didn't get out of the way quick enough. I haven't really been majorly bitten by anything, just a few dog and cat bites.

A lot of the zoo animals I do exams on are under anesthesia, and I think that's one of the pivotal things in our ability to treat and diagnose diseases. Before, a lot of surgical procedures were fairly limited. So "in the day," if you had a tiger with an abscessed canine, that tiger would live with the abscessed canine until it fell out - because of the fear of losing that animal under anesthesia.

Anesthetics have a much wider margin of safety now, exactly the same as with humans. Mortality rates are much, much lower. You also have reversal agents where you give the anesthetic and reverse the effects of it with what we call an antagonist. The animal can be awakened in minutes, totally back to normal.

I've worked with a lot of animals at the California Academy of Sciences that I hadn't before, like invertebrates. We have a fairly diverse cephalopod collection - octopus, squid, cuttlefish, nautilus - and a large collection of coral starfish, crabs, sea anemones and insects.

We've had challenges with our open-top tanks when visitors drop things into them. A little girl was standing at the swamp tank and her shoe fell in. Claude the albino alligator swallowed it, thinking it was a fish. We had to get it out.

I tried to get a biologist with the longest arm to go through the alligator's mouth and into its stomach. He reached in as far as he could but he was about a foot too short. So we had to use some endoscopy equipment that was made to retrieve foreign bodies from dolphins. I had it shipped from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

I have a box of things dropped into tanks and eaten by animals, which I've had to retrieve. A shoe and a camera case from Claude. A pair of sunglasses, two cell phones and a toy dinosaur retrieved from our redtail catfish in the rain forest tank. Since then we've corrected the problem with a debris catch net over the swamp tank, and the redtail catfish who swallowed things without spitting them out was transferred to an aquarium in Nevada.